78th Academy Awards Preview

Tonight the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will give out their awards, commonly known as the Oscars. No matter how cynical I get about awards and the Oscars in particular, I still have to watch them. Slate has a discussion of How to Watch the Oscars and The Guardian has a good feature about Oscars 2006.
This year is fascinating in that most of the films nominated are more independent films that are outside of the Hollywood machine. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. Edward Jay Epstein writes in Slate that Art Flicks Make Beautiful Decoys, in that they are showered with awards, but not with money as they don't lend themselves to sequels or merchandising. Looking at the Independent Spirit Awards, a lot of the nominees are the same as those for the Academy Awards. Indiewire notices that if you add the budgets of four of the nominees for Best Picture, it comes to US$35 million and the other nominee, Munich had a budget of US$70 million. Is this a sign of things changing in Hollywood, or is it just a way to try and bring some prestige to a year that may have been a bit thin on great films from the big studio machine?